It was not a shock to discover that most people that received word of the survey and took it are knowledgeable in JavaScript. In fact, 81% of people that answered the survey know JavaScript to a high level.

Here’s the rundown of the first question, “What languages do you know to a high level?”:

And here’s the second, “What languages do you want to learn?”:

People could select more than one checkbox, e.g. Bobby wants to learn C++ and Ruby…

Also, “high level” is ill-defined, so is liable to subjective modesty and vanity alike.

Overall there were 77 people that took the survey, and from the survey results plus various other comments it seems that there is interest for *something* to help us pick up alien programming languages/platforms, but we’re just not sure what.

If you’re interested in further pursuing this speck of an idea, please feel free to go ahead. Right now I’m limited on time. I would be very interested in a platform enabling such an exchange. I am sure that it would garner some interest within the community too. I can’t promise anything though.

I am personally looking for someone with an immense knowledge of Perl to tutor me via Skype. But this person should also be yearning to learn JavaScript to a high level. If such a person exists, please contact me.

@Sarfraz – there are so many articles comparing the two already. Learn one and you’ll know a bit about the other quickly. The biggest difference I don’t see alluded to in ab comparisons is the community around the two languages. Quite different! Happy Google’ing on that topic.

In general, I’d love the idea of a programming language exchange. Further, I’d love to just spend time with someone talking about design differences between two languages since I feel that is one of the biggest struggles in adopting a new language. I.e. JavaScript inheritance (or lack thereof) vs Ruby. James, any idea on formalizing this exchange event? I have a friend trying to launch getkoru.com which might be a neat platform to try it out; I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.